xp_logs | Angelo and Bella; Angelo and Nathan (Reply)

Sometime last week, Angelo takes Joyita to visit a very bored Bella, and eventually persuades her going outside would be more fun than destroying Nathan's bed.

As he'd told Nathan he would and finding himself with a free afternoon, Angelo (after a quick detour to the medlab to check with Moira) went back to his room in company of Joyita and went upstairs to visit Bella. The door, as expected, was unlocked, so he opened it a little to let Joyita in first.

He was greeted by a shriek. "BAH!" Bella howled at him. "Bah! Go away!" She fluttered her wings in agitation, smacking her beak against the bars of her cage. "Avanti!"

Angelo ducked automatically, then straightened a little sheepishly. "Bella. Sssh. You know me."

"Bad! BAD!" Bella shrieked, then cut loose with a string of Italian profanity.

Angelo looked at her, one eyebrow raised. "Why bad? Moira said we could be here."

Bella hopped from one perch to the other, hissing. "Nate! Nate bad! Nate away! BAD!"

Angelo eyed her, vaguely disturbed by her behaviour. "Yeah, he said you'd be pissed about that. That's why I'm here. I brought the puppy..."

Bella growled, but then peered down at Joyita. "Cane?"

Angelo nodded. "Cane, yes. You want out of the cage?"

"Out!" She bounced. "OutoutoutoutOUT!"

He laughed, moving to unlatch the cage. "Out it is, then."

Bella fluttered down to the floor, cooing a little. Then she scuttled over to Joyita and tried to bite her.

Joyita yelped, and Angelo immediately intervened, scooping her out of the range of snapping beaks, and told the bird sternly "Bella. Stop that."

Bella snapped her beak at him and then scuttled in the direction of the bedroom. "Pillow! Whee!" he heard her shriek, and by the time he followed her, she had already torn one of the pillows open and was shredding it gleefully.

"Oh, no, Bella, don't do that... D'you wanna go outside, instead?"

"Heehee!" Bella danced around on the bed amid the falling feather. "Whee! Fun!"

He couldn't help laughing. "Fun for you, not for Moira. Come on, let's go outside, you can play with the snow."

Bella promptly jumped off the bed and vanished beneath. "Peekaboo! Peekaboo! Heehee!"

He dropped to his knees, peering carefully under the bed for her. "Bella, please come out."

There was a grinding noise from under the bed, followed by more avian laughter.

"...Bella? What are you doin' down there?"

The grinding noise was following by a metallic clang. "Oooo!" Bella trilled suddenly. "Ooo!"

Angelo groaned. "Bella. Please don't kill the bed."

"Bite me!"

"You'd like the snow. Really. Please come outside."

There was a brief pause, and then Bella waddled out from under the bed, regarding him skeptically. "Oooout?"

He nodded earnestly. "Out. It'll be fun. You can play with Joyita, but no biting." The puppy peeked cautiously out at Bella from behind his back.

Bella gave him a long, speculative look. "Out," she finally proclaimed, and strutted towards him, grabbing onto his arm and climbing to his shoulder. "Out now! Go."

He laughed. "Well, I guess that's me told. Out we go, then. C'mon, Joyita." And out they went, down the stairs and through the front door.

On Monday morning, Angelo stops by to see Nathan, is given his present from New Mexico, and learns a bit about Nathan's telepathy.

Angelo put Joyita's leash on, preparing to take her out for her morning walk. On the way out of his room, he decided to take a detour via the third floor, to welcome Nathan back from his trip.

Nathan looked up from where he was trying to get a batch of Mandarin exercises from the week before last marked. "Come in," he called, smiling a little as he sensed that it was Angelo.

Angelo pushed the door open and walked in, the dog bouncing ahead of him. "Mornin', Nathan."

"Hey," Nathan said amiably, then smiled at the puppy - who was not looking quite so much like a puppy anymore. "Sorry, Joyita. Miles came by and bird-napped your pal."

Angelo chuckled. "Ahh, they had enough fun while you were away she can do without this time. How was your trip?"

Nathan rolled his eyes, though he kept smiling. "It was a business trip, Angelo," he said patiently. "The business was concluded satisfactorily. That's as good as it gets."

"I meant the one afterwards", Angelo answered lightly, sitting down on the couch and oofing as Joyita jumped on him. "With Amanda."

"Oh, that one," Nathan said with a chuckle, scrawling a quick mark on one exercise and then setting the stack aside, swiveling around in the desk chair. "It was nice. I think it did her good."

Angelo smiled. "That's good. She probably needed the time out."

"That's one thing that I don't think people around here have had the chance to find out. You get over stressful situations faster if you have a little time to unwind after the fact."

Angelo laughed a little. "Yeah. I think our record for shortest time between crisises is about four hours."

"Now, don't exaggerate, Angelo," Nathan said, shaking his pen at him. "I can think of a few times where there's actually been six."

Angelo tilted his head in acknowledgment. "Maybe you're right. Same diff, though."

Nathan shook the pen at him again. "Now you're sounding like the one who needs a vacation," he said, then stuck the pen behind his ear. "I thought things had been pretty quiet while we were gone?"

"Oh, they were. Just... first time in awhile, you know? Really hammers the contrast in. But maybe things'll stay quiet for a while now."

"We're due a nice, long run of quiet," Nathan said easily. "Good karma, or whatever you want to call it..." He gave Angelo a mildly reproving look. "Stressing out over the lack of stress is a perfectly valid reaction, but that doesn't mean you should do it."

Angelo grinned wryly, stroking Joyita's ears. "Point taken. I'll try not to."

"Oh, Amanda's got something for you... I won't spoil the surprise. But I picked up something, too," Nathan said, rising and vanishing briefly into the bedroom, where his duffel bag was still only half-unpacked.

Angelo grinned, waiting for his present. "I'll track her down later. What've you got?"

Nathan came back out with something wrapped in tissue paper. "Stereotypical," he said, handing it over, "but it's real - as in real Navajo, I mean. Amanda and I told the elderly Navajo woman running the craft store we stopped at about you, and the fact that you had trouble sleeping, and she was very firm that we needed to bring this back for you."

Angelo opened the package and grinned broadly. "Oh, cool. You never know, maybe it'll even work - I'll put it up when I get back to the room." Glancing at Joyita, he amended, "Up on the wall, above puppy height."

Nathan watched Angelo examine the dreamcatcher - and Joyita examine the dreamcatcher's dangling feathers with interest. #No,# he sent firmly, right at the dog. Who proceeded to jump a half-foot into the air, resembling nothing so much as a startled cat, before she stopped and stared at him.

Angelo looked up, startled, then laughed at the look on Joyita's face. "What'd you do, send her somethin'?"

Nathan nodded, not breaking eye contact with Joyita. #No,# he sent again, just as firmly, and flashed her an image of the dreamcatcher up on the wall and her sitting below it, not paying any attention to the tempting dangly bits.

Angelo watched, amused, as Joyita sat bolt upright, staring intently at Nathan. She whined plaintively, shooting a fleeting glance back at the dreamcatcher.

"This is where you say 'But Nathan, I didn't know you could talk to animals'," Nathan said, giving the dog a smile before looking back at Angelo. "And then I point out that while hyacinth macaws are very smart, Bella is unnaturally so - which I think has something to do with the fact that I've been in telepathic contact with her so much over the years."

Angelo grinned. "I can take a guess at what you were tellin' Joyita. An' Bella is scary smart - do you read anythin' from Joyita in return?"

"Nothing particularly complex. No offense, Joyita," Nathan said with a grin. "Images, mostly. Smells and tastes, too." He leaned back in the desk chair, shrugging cheerfully. "It's something I started doing with the horses while I was undercover in Kazakhstan, actually."

"What, so they'd get exactly what you wanted them to do?" Angelo asked, interested.

Nathan nodded. "I didn't fit in well," he said, "because I'd had all of a month's training with horses before they sent me in. So I found myself actually trying my telepathy to sort of smooth things over. Which was a pretty big thing for me, at that point," he said more thoughtfully. Of course, horses weren't human beings, and their minds had generally been pretty pleasant to be in contact with.

"Did it work?" came the next intrigued question.

Nathan nodded. "Pretty well, actually. Horses have a limited understanding of verbal commands - these ones understood Kazakh, of course. Images worked better."

"Sounds pretty cool", Angelo answered with a grin. "Really interestin', too."

"Just don't spread it around," Nathan said with a laugh. "Last thing I need is for people to start calling me a horse whisperer or something." He cast a look at the empty cage. "Bella's unique, though. I think she must be fairly intelligent even for a macaw."

Angelo nodded in agreement. "Not that I met any macaws before her, but she seems it."

"It's funny. I never had any... hesitation, using my telepathy with animals." Nathan's eyes went distant as he thought of those two years on the street and how the stray cats had... well, he didn't need to be dwelling. "Humans were another matter entirely for a long, long time."

"I guess it's easier with animals", Angelo ventured. "Simpler things on their end, like you said."

"The Professor asked me once, months ago, not long after we started working on my telepathy, why I had no qualms about using it with animals and was so afraid to use it with most humans." Nathan smiled a bit, shrugging again. "I told him animals weren't a threat. When he pointed out that most people weren't, either, and the only answer I could come up with was a very lame 'Well, they could be!'... well, that was something of a turning point for me."

Angelo nodded, understanding. "Makes sense. Are you feelin' better about usin' it with humans now, then?"

"Lots," Nathan said. "Hell, it's getting to be second-nature, almost... and if you believe it, I was giving Charles telepathic reports every day from Las Vegas. I'm surprised I managed it."

Angelo looked impressed. "That's quite a range. Did you know you could do that?"

Nathan shook his head, still smiling. "And he claims he was doing less and less of the work as the week went on, too. Apparently I'm supposed to stop making self-deprecating jokes about not being much of a telepath now."

"Not a bad thing", Angelo pointed out. "If they're not true."

"I'm still a lot more comfortable with the TK," Nathan admitted. "But I'm starting to see how valuable the telepathy can be." Situations like Arcade's casino were rare, after all. "I used to just use it very... roughly. Like an early warning system. It's why my shields were and still sort of are a bit iffy, because I used it like that for so long."

"That's somethin' you can fix, though, right? With time, now you're workin' on it?"

"It's a lot better than it was, and I haven't stopped working on it," Nathan confirmed. "Anyhow. One more thing to get back into the swing of, now that I'm back. Marking comes first, though." He raised an eyebrow at Angelo. "I'd ask where your head was on that last Mandarin quiz, but I think I know."

Angelo grinned ruefully. "Uh... yeah. Probably?"

Nathan waved a hand. "I forgive you," he said magnanimously. "Even if you did do terrible things to that poor composition exercise."

"You've marked it, then? What'd I do wrong?"

"Let's just say you came at a few things backwards," Nathan said generously, a twinkle in his eye.

Angelo blinked. "...Huh. Okay... guess I'll see what I did an' fix it when you give it back."

"Tomorrow afternoon," Nathan said firmly. "We'll go over the whole thing bit by bit then."

Angelo nodded. "Fair enough. I'll try not to get distracted again."

Nathan shook his head. "Don't worry about it," he said. "If I failed to take into account the frequent crises around here, what kind of teacher would I be?"

Angelo snickered. "Very true."